Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Better There than There

In Microaggression, this one alluded briefly to notions of this superiority or top form of civilization or technology, and it seems to be behoven from the subject itself--though perhaps childishly vindictive--to point out that the ramshackle human-created environment available here is in no way advanced or refined or superior, or at the top of its class, compared to, say, other civilization.

Terran Barians' venal "justice" system may be less rife with open bribery than that of the, say, DR of Congo, but it is nonetheless terrible and unfair; it may be more fair in comparison when it's a 1790 version of a bunch of literate landholding jurors trying a peer wealthy landholder for whether or not he clubbed his butler based on their perception of facts alone, eschewing their personal feelings about him, if any, and trying to satisfy some internal sense of honor to actually figure out what happened.

Nonetheless, like you don't want to have open heart surgery performed on you by unlicensed street doctors in Chelyabinsk Oblast who've been eyeing your wallet and ask if you're sure no one knows where you're visiting today, you don't want to interact with the "white" justice system on Terra if you can at all help it. Despairing vindictiveness is, at the least, rather ripe here, even if not understood by its hosts.

Similarly, the broken and wretched morass of foreshortened, stagnating technology here is an embarrassment; to call it "remedial" would be an excessively high compliment, the same of which could be said about the quaint habit of intersections for wheeled vehicles. Terrans are quite proud of their ever-crumbling roadways and speculations of limited intrasolar spaceflight, and, in their dumb isolation, can pretend that no one else has ever been as smart as they. For illustration, imagine a galaxy or a verse filled with X billion planets that can "potentially" harbor life, and then imagine those places developing without thousands of years of intellectual voids here and there where people were dancing around praising sky-man, or diversity, or whatever, and instead inventing things at a rate comparable to Earthly humans just trying to find something they can sell without involving sky-man or diversity. Imagine the X-hundred trillion dollars in real estate or capital not being devoted to sky-man or diversity, and just being used to pay scientists to figure stuff out. That's your competition. People who have pretty flawless neurocomputers integrated with their flying personal transports that are powered by atmosphere, so next decade's grocery basics are lined up while you get driven somewhere except the dudes in the backroom of the grocery store are not special disabled hires who lose everything but stock robots who never make mistakes. Or, more importantly, a standard populace of people who, two minutes into about any Terran politician's speech, chuckles mildly and reacts toward him sort of like Terrans would react toward some dude screaming pantless about the end of the world in Times Square. No one watching sportsball or crime drama and you start to realize what a madhouse this looks like compared to a sane place. Basic shit like that to easily embarrass Terra; to give a shadow of despairing doubt or promising hope that it really isn't so great, here; that this result we see now isn't anything like an apex.

(And good grief, not to demean athletics or the desire to watch them being performed, but the way and reason people do that here is a complex of such a hideous stew of personal problems that, as an example for here, it serves.)

Regarding racism, and accomplishments appurtenant thereto which can assist in making judgments, it is presumed to be an insult to say "Group A is X quantity intelligent; Group B is merely X-1 intelligent." In the scale of all total possibilities, proper perspective demonstrates that, as to Terra and Terrans, if X is relatively minuscule enough, it isn't particularly offensive as to Group B to draw such conclusions. It may be offensive to all Groups in the study, but not particularly as to Group B. And that's something that Terrans, in their combination of possessing rather monumental ignorance and arrogance, tend not to want to see--that their traditions, inventions, and so forth, are not all that impressive. Being proud of what "white" people have accomplished is rather like being pleased that you're at the head of the class for retarded kids. So it might be offensive to everyone created from this planet, but not to "black" people in particular, to say "Golly gee, blacks sure can't do math at northeast Asian levels." Offensive to blacks within the confines of this low-ability group, but more realistically, there's very little difference. To put it bluntly, we're all so daft that it's really splitting hairs to say that one group of people on this rock is "smarter than" another.

Of course, one group is rather massively ahead of others, on this rock, and within those confines, gradations can be made, just like a good baker can make exemplary cakes and cakes that are merely good, identifiable by someone who eats their baked stuff regularly. But our ability to take universally vast offense at the thought that some of us might not be as smart as others of us is pitiful; it's like being proud that you won a pecking fight with the roosters who have already been proven to be subordinate to the clique of weakly roosters who weren't strong enough to be in the dominant clique. Gaining a proper perspective on our "racism," as well as our "universalism" or "anti-racism," means swallowing such bitter pills as realizing that the difference is really not that significant at all; indeed, that it may be properly ignored as an irrelevant, excessive detail in some circumstances.

Which is not to say that, when trapped here, it's unimportant to adjust your behavior in accordance with the local gradations, just like when you're in a jungle it's better to walk with a certain level of wariness when a llama is in the area, versus a certain level of wariness when a tiger is in the area. It's naive, it's stupid, to pretend that you should make the exact same set of calculations, assumptions, predictions, whatever, about the behavior of the llama versus the tiger, the caution you should take, et cetera. You are likely not going to, though, play a challenging game of chess with either organism, even if the tiger can figure out to roll the ball through a round hole in the playpen in which you trap it, while the llama just keeps nosing the ball against the triangle-shaped hole, completely not getting it.